WELCOME TO CINEMATHEQUE QUINONES!
“People don't read any more. It's a sad state of affairs. Reading's the only thing that allows you to use your imagination. When you watch films it's someone else's vision, isn't it?"
― Lemmy Kilmister...
So...what kind of aesthetic or intellectual value can we get from Hollywood Mainstreamers? A lot, says critic Peter Quinones, not accepting that high art in films can only come from the Indies or the Art House.

Monday, March 31, 2014

So – my three favorite Starbucks in
Manhattan – at Bond
and Broadway, at 17th and Union
Square, at 39th and 8th –
always remind me of Diner. Why is that? At first blush it seems these types of
hangouts are quite different. Of course,
they are. I’ll confess that when I’m in
one of these places I’m not, like the ensemble six of Diner, debating the
relative merits of Mathis vs. Sinatra or engaging in braggadocio about how I can get a girl to grab my pecker on our
first date – but I certainly see groups of young men who are the 2014 versions
of these guys. I often wonder if they
even know what Diner is. No longer
young myself, I feel nostalgic pangs for the days when I and my buddies were on
the precipice of busting out into the world.
I always think of Barry Levinson’s initial effort in these situations,
and I guess it’s an open question as to whether or not allowing a movie to
intrude on your consciousness so often is a wise idea.

Whatever! What I hope to do on this blog is,
eventually, get to discuss each of the six male ensemble characters in the film
a little bit (the wife portrayed by Ellen Barkin is a cardboard cutout; in my
estimation Levinson at that juncture in his career could not create authentic
female characters, otherwise I would include her), one by one. This will hopefully be at sporadic and
unpredictable intervals. At random, we’ll
begin with Fenwick (played by Kevin Bacon; on the DVD Bacon gives an
interesting insight into something he did that helped him play the role very
effectively, for anybody who’s interested to that degree) and five scenes he
figures in prominently. Fenwick is an
impenetrable character. His motivation
is hard to understand. His burgeoning
alcoholism is not explained. His harsh
sarcasm and cynicism has no given backstory.
All of this, in my opinion, is to Levinson’s credit. He doesn’t cave in to the fear of presenting things
without reasons behind them.

I
list these simply for the sake of compilation:

1.At the very beginning of the film, on Christmas night,
the camera picks up Fenwick in the basement of the building where the Christmas
party is being held, smashing windows and obviously drunk. Boogie (Mickey Rourke) appears and asks him
why he’s breaking the windows; he has no answer other than “It’s a smile.” He also makes an intellectual remark about
the composition of glass that presciently anticipates a later scene that shows
off his intelligence. He tells Boogie
that he dumped his date for five dollars with a kid named Frazer; when Boogie
observes that she’s only an eleventh grader and thus her intelligence is not
fully developed, Fenwick’s answer is “Yeah but her tits were.”

2.Reconciled, through Boogie’s efforts, with his date, Fenwick
speeds his car down the road well ahead of the others (as they leave the party
to go to the diner) so as to be able to turn the car over and fake a serious
accident, smearing his face with catsup as fake blood. Once the gag is found out and Beth remarks, “Very
mature, Fenwick” his answer is “Fuck mature!”

3.He watches a quiz show hosted by Allen Ludden (between
students from Cornell and Bryn Mawr!) and knows all the answers, bitterly
mumbling them or calling them out, confirming his intelligence and mastery of
this material.

4.When Boogie gets into serious economic trouble due to
his wild, out of control betting habits, Fenwick tries to help out by going to
his brother Howard, whom he despises, to try to borrow money. Here we learn that he has a small trust fund,
doesn’t work, is estranged from the family, and hates Howard. Howard lectures him about reading Dale
Carnegie and refuses to lend him the money to help Boogie.

5.Smashed, he strips to his underwear and climbs into the
manger in the life sized nativity scene on the front lawn of a local church. (There’s a continuity error here. The manger is empty, without the baby Jesus
statue in it – as is the case in most scenes of this kind up until Christmas
eve, when the baby would be placed in the crib.
However, the first scene of the film was shown with the title Christmas
Night, so presumably this scene is occurring later, so presumably the baby would
have been placed in the crib already.)
When Billy, Shrevie and Eddie come to try and fetch him he creates a
scene of general chaos, fighting and knocking over statues, landing everybody
in jail for the night.

Wednesday, March 26, 2014

On
this blog we generally try, with any given film, not to attempt to unravel more
than maybe one half of one percent of the issues and questions that the film
may raise. This restriction sometimes
hurts, especially with a picture like Notes on a Scandal that could
probably support a 150 page essay on its own.
This motion picture is so meticulously planned, so well storyboarded,
and so unusually rich both visually and verbally that it’s painful to pick and
choose. (Of course, it’s also incoherent
and preposterous in places. So be
it.) Here I’d like to rope off two
different scenes that feature the same exact surprising revelation about a
character. One comes quite early on in
the picture, the other much later. Let’s
get some background.

Sheba
Hart (Cate Blanchett is well cast in the role, especially in the way her
habitually loose, floppy clothes hang off her tall, lanky body; “Bash” to her
husband) is new to teaching, beginning her first year in the art department at
St. George’s School. In her thirties,
she’s begun a scandalous forbidden affair with her fifteen year old student
Connolly (Andrew Simpson). In the early
scene I’d like to glance at here a much older, psychotic, delusional veteran
teacher named Barbara Covett (Judi Dench does what she can with the hopeless
role) finds out about the affair; in the later scene her much older husband
Richard (the great actor Bill Nighy in a sensational performance) finds
out.

Barbara
is a lonely, bitter, misanthropic woman.
Her diary musings, given to us in great supply throughout the movie via
voiceover narration, show her to be vain, condescending, manipulative, hateful,
sneering, and a predator. (We learn at
the very end that a teacher, now gone, with whom she had a friendship –
Jennifer Dodd – actually hit her with a restraining order.) She is immediately taken with Sheba and
watches her closely from a distance, making endless comments in her diary. (In fact one of her diary entries opens the
film – she remarks that her diary is the only thing to whom she trusts her
secrets!)

Barbara
sees Sheba
as “the wispy novice” who is “artfully disheveled” and that “they flock to her,
even limp little Brian” (Brian being a meek, shy teacher who will play a key
role later). Of Richard, he’s a
“crumbling patriarch”. Their Down’s
Syndrome child is a “court jester”. When
the family does some (admittedly trippy) dancing after dinner, this is
“Bourgeoisie Bohemia.” Yet, her sarcasm and rapier hate also betray
an understanding of people born of deep and long experience – at coffee, when a
fellow teacher remarks to Sheba and Barbara, “I’ve got an announcement,”
Barbara says “You’re leaving St. George’s” and when the teacher says no, she
then offers “Oh, then you’re pregnant,” which is correct. She’s obviously seen the scene many times
before.

Barbara
and Sheba
first meet when the younger teacher is unable to stop a fight that breaks out
in class between Connolly and Davis; Barbara rushes in to help. She remarks that the boys are “little towers
of testosterone”. The incident gives her
an opportunity to establish a beachhead with Sheba, a foundation for a
friendship whose motives, we suspect, are not entirely sane or healthy.

Here’s
how she finds out about Sheba
and young Connolly-Sheba doesn’t show up for the
school Christmas concert, so Barbara goes searching for her. Seeing the lights on (it’s evening) in the
art room, she proceeds to investigate. Of course she finds her – through a
window she’s able to clearly see Sheba and Connolly having sex
inside. (In fact, the sighting is way
too easy, which is a flaw in the film.
Anyone could have happened by and spotted the wrongdoing.)

By
this point we’ve gotten the feeling that Barbara is tough as nails and that
very little in going to surprise or shock her, which makes the end of this
scene remarkable. The faces of the two
women are caught in expressions that achieve what I’m tempted to call a kind of
cinematic miracle. Dench, Blanchett,
director Richard Eyre and cinematographer Chris Menges all team up to create
something extraordinarily powerful. As
Connolly sneaks away, Sheba
has a kind of joyous naughty girl expression on her face that is worth twenty
pages of dialogue. Similarly, as
Connolly comes out of the building and walks off, Barbara looks after him with
a stare of incredulity that is absolutely priceless. Right here – in just this one clip of film –
the movie justifies itself as a piece of cinematic art many times over.

After
cutting to Barbara, shell shocked, alone, in her apartment later that same
night Eyre cuts quickly to Sheba
in a supermarket parking lot with her mentally disabled boy, moving their
groceries from the shopping cart to their vehicle. Barbara calls her. The comparison of the shots of the two women
on the phone with each other is instructive – the older, alone, in her tidy
apartment, holding the cordless phone in her hand exactly as well she might
have done with a cordless rotary phone fifty years ago, the younger, with her
child, balancing the cell phone on her shoulder, multi tasking.

Caught
red handed, Sheba
can do nothing but agree to a meeting.

Eyre’s
style here is very classically oriented – straight cuts, plenty of shot-reverse
shot technique, commentative music (a score with no percussion by Phillip Glass
that sets the mood). As Barbara
questions Sheba about the
affair Sheba
opens up in a way that she will not when, later, her husband finds out about
the dalliance in a much more explosive scene.
(Keep in mind that Barbara has her own ulterior motives, selfish and
personal, that I’m not getting into here with any depth –she manipulates the
situation to her advantage, to suit her own purposes. Sheba
explains that Connolly came to her seeking help with his drawing (as it turns
out almost everything of importance that Connolly tells Sheba turns out
to be a calculating lie) and that one thing led to another. She says it was “innocent”. (Interestingly enough, later, when she is
trying to explain it all to her husband, she claims the reverse.) She sends him away but he “refused to accept
it” and kept coming back.

But
here’s the rub – she tells Barbara that it began to feel like their secret, and
secrets are seductive. While she knew it
was all wrong, she says she began to feel “entitled”. It asked her, Why shouldn’t you be bad? You’ve earned the right (by being a good
wife, loving mother, etc.) – why shouldn’t you transgress a little? And so the bad girl impulse that we glimpsed
on her face a little earlier comes around full circle.

And
yet later, when she has the opportunity to explain the affair to her husband,
all she can do is stammer that she doesn’t know why she did it. We can have a field day with this, of course,
and all the circumstances are not identical.
For example, Barbara found out about the affair entirely on her own, by
being a peeping Tom, whereas Richard finds out because Connolly’s mother bursts
into the house and throws Sheba a beating (in turn, she has found out about the affair through the grapevine – Barbara planted
the rumor with the whiney, wimpy Brian a few days before and waited for it to
spread).

This
film, as I say, is very rich and abnormally well planned. Very careful attention has to be paid in
order to catch numerous slices of important dialogue and critical visual
information. Too, a lot of the
supporting players are very strong – I have to conclude that Eyre is very
strong with actors. Phil Davis, Michael Maloney,
Stephen Kennedy and Derbhle Crotty are all superb. Bill Nighy absolutely steals the
picture. (Watch the scene in which
Barbara is trying to get Sheba
to come to the vet with her while Sheba’s family is waiting for her
in the car, to go to Ben’s play!) I
guess what stimulates me to include it here is the different ways Sheba reacts to
Barbara’s and to Richard’s learning of her taboo affair. As an overall example of the various
departments of the cinema it ain’t too bad, either.

Wednesday, March 19, 2014

So
look – in keeping with the tradition we’ve established on this blog of
isolating one or two scenes of a film with an eye towards meaningful
dissection, I would like to see what Airport can tell us about a
particular concept that psychologists call companionate love. Obviously this
means that I am not herein concerned with “disaster movie” nonsense or Grand
Hotel type characterizations.

Please
allow me to paraphrase John W. Santrock’s paraphrase of the famous Triangular
theory of love as presented by the eminent psychologist Robert J. Sternberg:

“A relationship marked by intimacy and
commitment but low

or lacking in passion is companionate love, a pattern often found in

couples who have been married for
many years.”

I’m
interested in the scenes in Airport that involve D.O. Guerrero
and his wife Inez, played respectively by Van Heflin and Maureen Stapleton
(Stapleton’s performance, at least up until her character has to interact with
others in the ensemble cast, is absolutely gut twisting – it is one of the
greatest in the history of American films, period.)

Let’s
be clear – Airport is intended solely as entertainment, not art. Nobody supposes that George Seaton, in
directing and adapting the screenplay from Arthur Hailey’s novel, had the conscious
thought, “Hmmm, let’s see what we can say about companionate love in this
picture.” Of course not. (Although I will point out that other kinds
of love that psychologists often classify are myriad in the film, in the
relationships for example between
Bakersfeld and his wife, Demarest and his wife, Demarest and Gwen, and Patroni
and his wife.) Yet these scenes function
as a great example of the enormous power
of the cinema to communicate abstract ideas, particularly ones that, once
applied to practical existence, greatly touch our emotions.

And,
if I may add, in these scenes every
aspect of filmmaking is a participant – acting, directing, the set decorations,
the art direction, the music, the essentially still camera, the minimalism of
the dialogue – all of it.

I
can’t say enough about the work of the set decorators – Jack D.Moore and Mickey
S. Michaels, and the art directors, Alexander Golitzen and F. Preston Ames, in
constructing the destitute, poverty stricken atmosphere of the Guerrero apartment
and the desperate air of the café where Inez works. We first meet D.O. Guerrero about thirty five
minutes into the picture, at a pay phone that turns out to be in the hallway of
the building where he lives. At first
we’re thinking, in addition to who’s this guy, where is he? It’s obviously not anywhere in the airport,
where most of the scenes have taken place thus far - although there have been a
few shots in other places, all of them nice looking and very pleasantly
presented to us – the Bakersfeld home, Bakersfeld’s father in law’s club, a
banquet hall, the Patroni home, Gwen’s apartment, and the dining room of one of
the homes that’s too close to Runway 22.
Let me say again – all these other locales have been quite attractive,
so our radar immediately goes up when we encounter the shocking gray-brown
shabbiness of the Guerrero apartment. Wherefore
this squalor?

He’s
been on the phone with the airline, confirming that the flight to Rome is still on
schedule. (As an aside – this is one of
the few phone conversations in the film that Seaton chooses not to show as a
split screen.) Already there are so
many questions – he doesn’t have a phone in his apartment? What kind of place is he living in? What is he doing going to Rome?
Why is the apartment so run down looking? As he moves into the bedroom and we see the
bomb paraphernalia on the bed we begin to understand his connection to, and his
part in, the larger story – especially as he tests the bomb’s rigging in the
attaché case a couple of times and the ominous music plays on the
soundtrack. Perhaps more importantly for
this discussion, it helps us understand the magnitude of the lies he is telling
his wife.

Next
we see him trudging through the snowstorm to the modest coffee shop where his
wife works. Again, the set and the art
direction are sensational, right down to the OCCUPANCY BY MORE THAN 53
PERSONS…sign.

As
they sit for a moment and talk the level of his deception – known to us but not
to her – makes us feel deeply for her because she obviously feels so deeply for
him. We know he plans to board a flight
to Rome and detonate a bomb, but she thinks he’s
going off to start a new job in Milwaukee. Through the short, terse expository dialogue
we piece together the details of what their life has been like of late. He works in something like excavation and
demolition and is apparently unable to keep a job because of his temper – he
keeps getting into arguments with his bosses.
They’ve descended into bankruptcy and beyond – abject poverty,
apparently – to the degree that he’s pawned everything but her mother’s ring,
which she warns him not to do. We don’t
learn until later that he has had mental problems and was fired from his last
job for stealing sticks of dynamite.

Her
simple, innocent faith - her companionate love – for him is so
sincere and true that she doesn’t even ask for any kind of confirmation or
proof of the new job, even when he makes the outrageous statement “I can draw
an advance on my salary tomorrow.” What? Really?
On the first day of a brand new job, you need an advance on your
salary? That’s not a red flag in your
new employer’s face?

Let’s
eavesdrop on some of her remarks and comments in this conversation.

“This
isn’t going to be another one of these hello-goodbye jobs, is it?”

“This
time do me one favor – if your boss says two and two is six, agree with him.”

“Don’t
lose your temper.”

“Nothing’s
the way it used to be. I’m not
complaining…Better or for worse, I meant what I said.”

After
he drifts off into some nostalgic pipe dreaming: “Stop. Stop dreaming. Just hold on to the job.”

“I
can give the landlord another hard luck story.
Goodbye Dom.”

He
leaves and eventually boards the plane; through a series of plot contrivances
she comes to realize exactly what is going on and races off through the night
in the horrible blizzard to try and stop him from boarding. As we follow this dazed journey of hers we
come to sympathize with her totally, to be moved by her incredible devotion to
a man who is by any rational estimation no good for her in any way. And at this point we still don’t even know
all the sorry details about him that we eventually will, after Bakersfeld
questions her.

Following
her run through the airport, and then seeing her shocked face pressed against
the glass at the gate as she watches the plane go, it’s hard not to be stirred
by her not only companionate but also (we realize now) unconditional love. What a job of acting this is by
Stapleton. The situation requires that
she communicate not only her horror at the realization that he’s going to
explode a bomb on the plane but also that he lied extravagantly to her about the job
in Milwaukee but also that his final act in this world was a misguided,
desperate attempt to give her financial security. This last also in turn demonstrates the depth
of his
love for her, although we must keep in mind that he still chooses to pull
the cord even after he knows the insurance won’t go through.

I
hope this little discussion has gone a small way towards showing the amount of
intellectual and emotional juice we can squeeze out of films in places where we
may not necessarily expect to!!